Music essays you can dance to

HORNBY1/C/10SEPT96/DD/TKAO= was at Kepler's book store in Menlo Park yesterday afternoon autographying his "High Fidelity". photo by Tim Kao, the Chronicle.

HORNBY1/C/10SEPT96/DD/TKAO= was at Kepler's book store in Menlo Park yesterday afternoon autographying his "High Fidelity". photo by Tim Kao, the Chronicle.

Photo: TIM KAO

Photo: TIM KAO

Image
1of/1

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 1

HORNBY1/C/10SEPT96/DD/TKAO= was at Kepler's book store in Menlo Park yesterday afternoon autographying his "High Fidelity". photo by Tim Kao, the Chronicle.

HORNBY1/C/10SEPT96/DD/TKAO= was at Kepler's book store in Menlo Park yesterday afternoon autographying his "High Fidelity". photo by Tim Kao, the Chronicle.

Photo: TIM KAO

Music essays you can dance to

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

On page 118 of his delightful, let's hope influential new book, Nick Hornby makes a startling admission. It comes as he's writing, a little defensively, about his late-onset love for Jackson Browne's 1974 song "Late for the Sky." "This may simply mean," he says of his newfound tolerance for Browne's mellow, heartfelt songcraft, "that I have become old, and so Jackson Browne's sedate music holds more appeal than punk -- that all this is a long- winded way of saying that I'm forty-five (today, as I write!), and so I listen to folky singer-songwriters, not bratty and loud guitar bands."

It's the start of an amiably longish sentence, like many of Hornby's, with perhaps more "thats" in it than generally advisable, so there would be no shame in missing the implications of that parenthetical exclamation. But think about it: Hornby wrote this essay on his birthday. Maybe things are different over in England, where Hornby lives, but here, birthdays are not for working. Birthdays are for having fun, for making the most of; in other words, for making oneself miserable trying to come up with something that'll still be memorable a week later, when someone innocently asks what you did for your birthday.

That Hornby spent his birthday writing a rueful, sneaky-profound essay about growing older suggests that he may actually enjoy his work. Maybe that helps explain why his readers enjoy it, too -- so much, in fact, that many of us would happily spend even precious birthday hours reading him.

Superficially, "Songbook" is a

collection of 26 exemplary essays about songs Hornby loves, accompanied by a CD containing 11 of them that his publisher could actually secure the rights to. The book's a joint benefit for the TreeHouse Trust, which helps autistic kids like Hornby's son, and 826 Valencia, the San Francisco learning center co- founded by McSweeney's publisher Dave Eggers in his continuing effort to use his fame -- as Maxwell Smart used to say -- for niceness, instead of evil.

But it would be a mistake to dismiss "Songbook," or even to cherish it, as just a good-hearted lark, a toss-off aimed at the obsessed vinyl-heads Hornby diagnosed so knowingly in his novel "High Fidelity." That whole subculture, all those mournful guys to whom the sound of record-store bin dividers clicking by is almost music enough, should love "Songbook," yet so should anyone interested in great essays, or in the delicate art of being funny, or in how to write about one's feelings in such a way that other people will actually care.

Not one of the essays here focuses exclusively on the music at hand. Many of them don't even get around to mentioning a song until near the end. The piece on Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker," for example, is a cunningly constructed study of snobbery, of how overcoming elitism often boils down to merely exchanging one form of it for another. The one about Ian Dury's "Reasons to Be Cheerful" turns into a half-patriotic, half-apologetic credo that somehow distills the very essence of Englishness. And just listen, in an essay about dancing that only later becomes an ode to the Velvelettes' "Needle in a Haystack," to the conspiratorial intimacy with which Hornby elaborates a particularly ingenious simile:

"The dance floor is still, to me, the social equivalent of the North Sea during English seaside holidays -- something to be treated with the utmost fear and caution, something you walk towards and away from over a period of several hours while battling with your own courage, something you plunge into briefly and uncomfortably while every corpuscle in your blood screams at you to get out before it's too late, something that leaves lots of important parts of you feeling shrivelled." Maybe Hornby can't dance, but he's got rhythm to burn.

Like Hornby's essays, the best writing about music shouldn't just make a reader want to play a song immediately, which can be tricky with "Songbook" as the CD's only track list appears on the surface of the disc itself. The best music writing should linger like an unshakable tune, haunting readers even years later, after too many hours between headphones have long since deafened us to the actual notes.

(It's a lesson, incidentally, that most of Sunday night's Grammy nominees in the album notes category have done their best to heed. In Tim Page's Glenn Gould essay and Dennis McNally's thumbnail history of the Grateful Dead, both written to accompany new box sets, each writer takes a subject he's written about umpteen times before and makes it bracingly fresh. On the new Artie Shaw box, the great clarinetist -- like Gould -- prefers to explain himself in a semi-scripted interview, but these memories are so enlightening that a reader can't bring himself to object. And Will Friedwald's dense notes for the new Sinatra collection must set some kind of record for facts to the inch, but there's no mistaking his mavenish love of the material. Unless David Evans' well-regarded Charley Patton essay wows voters, it ought to be a horse race between McNally and Gould.)

When "Songbook" doesn't win all the literary prizes it should -- too unpretentious, too funny, not rigorous enough -- somebody should think seriously about entering it in the running for next year's album notes Grammy. So what if the ratio of text to music is a tad top-heavy? So what if Hornby's informal, self-interrupting, almost dictated-sounding prose has to backtrack out of the occasional parenthetical cul de sac? Like his admitted literary heroine, Anne Tyler, Hornby expresses the embarrassing particularity of human behavior down to the semiquaver. Why doesn't anybody write about books with the same personal, visceral immediacy that Hornby brings to writing about songs?